Entitled “The Technology of Plagiarism and Plagiarism Detection: A 30-Year Game of Cat and Mouse”, the talk discussed how plagiarism has evolved with computers and how the efforts to detect and prevent it have evolved as well. The talk was previously live streamed during the conference.

The talk begins with the invention of copy and paste and takes us through the creation of modern article spinners and plagiarism detection systems.

I can’t embed the talk due to restrictions on the video, but you can view it at this link by looking up the “Tech Forum Fall 2010″ and the scrolling down to find my name (slightly past halfway down).

All in all, I had a great time at the conference and really enjoyed meeting both the faculty, the other speakers and the students at the school. It was nice to be in such a great environment and a great school. It was also nice to be able to give a talk with my hair down for once.

A special thanks goes to Professor Shelly Keating, who teaches at the school, for making the talk happen.

My slides are embedded below for anyone who wants to follow along and the text is licensed under a CC-BY-SA license.

Last week I gave an interview via satellite with Boise TV station KTVB (Note: I had mistakenly said on Twitter it was KBOI) about the Vaughn Ward plagiarism scandal. The interview was part of a larger special on plagiarism in politics and the scandal itself.

To recap what had happened, Ward was, at the time, a Republican candidate in the Senate primary. He was accused of plagiarizing President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. The accusations were originally made by a Republican blogger, Lucas Baumbach, who was also seeking a State Senate seat.

Ward lost the primary and is now out of the election completely.

You can view the original YouTube video here.

The interview is embedded below, you can view other segments from the special here.

This past Tuesday, March 30, 2010, I gave an hour-long webinar on copyright entitled “Copyright Basics for Creative Professionals, Media Companies and Content Archives”. The presentation was presented by Digimarc and ImageSpan and was presented to about 70 users.

The talk covers the following elements:

• Who should copyright their work;
• What a copyright protects;
• Where do you register your copyright;
• When you post your work online, the dangers you should be aware of;
• Why you should follow good licensing practices; and
• How you should respond to infringers

As you can see from the title and the topics, it is a fairly basic overview of copyright with a few interesting elements for a more web-savvy audience.

As a warning, there were some minor problems with the recording. First, you may have to turn up your volume as, for some reason, I was coming in fairly soft. Second, we did have to rush toward the end as there was a lot to get through and the presentation ran behind.

Still, for those who are interested in a quick overview of copyright law and how it applies on the Web, this might be a very good introductory course.

You can view the webinar in its entirety below or, if you wish to download it, you can get either the MP3 or the video file here.

In short, this is a video that goes over some of the basic functionality of the Myows system, how to use it and what its designed to do. It’s about 12 minutes long though I am going to prepare a truncated version for YouTube (under ten minutes).

If you’re curious about Myows or recently signed up, this should give you a pretty good primer on how it works and some of the major features of the system.

On a related note, I’m hoping to make this video part of a lengthy screencast series on copyright issues, perhaps a video every 1-2 weeks, if the interest is there. I would appreciate your thoughts on that and how to improve future videos.

Disclosure: Chris Matthieu, the founder of Numly, which is a competitor of Myows, is a former co-host of the Copyright 2.0 Show with me. Also, I am using my referral code for Myows in this article though there are no rewards for doing so. This is mainly for tracking purposes.

I’m proud to announce today that I am beginning a new series of video tutorials for Tubetorial that will focus on plagiarism detection, abuse reporting and other related issues. The first of those videos, entitled “How to Find the Host of a Site” was posted yesterday and is now embedded below.

Some may remember that I did a similar video back in 2007, however, the new video is a much more up-to-date version of that video focusing on both Domain Tools and WhoIsHostingThis. This video should explain how to find the host of a site both more easily and more accurately than the previous version.

I’ve also replaced the video on the “Finding the Host” page of the site with new one since it does provide instruction on the new tools (besides, the previous video even showed the old layout for the site).

The video, for those who are interested, is also embedded below:

Preservation Today describes itself as an attempt to “Inspire the advancement of heritage values in our society using the new form of communication called social media.” More directly, it is an experiment with trying to bring social media to the heritage and preservation community.

Part of that effort is to help educate the community’s members about issues related to social media including copyright and privacy, which is where I came in.

The video below is just of my portion of the netcast, which was very brief and mostly focused on basics of copyright and Web privacy. It probably is a bit fundamental for most of the readers of this site, but I still wanted to share it as it covers some topics not routinely discussed here.

If you wish to view the full video of the netcast, you can visit Preservation Today’s home page.

Specifically the post highlighted the lack of a “take down, stay down” system, such as the one Myspace, Photobucket’s parent company, uses and the ability for any user to print any image they see on the site. These two factors were also the subject of a petition against Photobucket, which now has some 6,700 signatures.

Photobucket, for their part, did not respond favorably to this and I was unfortunately forced to drop the matter for a while as other projects came up.

However, after a hiatus on the topic, I’m returning to it, this time with a 9-minute video illustrating one of the issues, namely the problems surrounding the printing system, but this time calling for users of Photobucket (as well as potentially infringed copyright holders) to pay attention to these issues.

The video, entitled “Commercial Printing with Photobucket” is embedded below and details how easy it is to turn any image on the site into a t-shirt, including personal ones, and how it compares to a similar service, namely Flickr.

PhotoBucket: Your Images for Sale from Jonathan Bailey on Vimeo.

Embed Code:

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You can find the video on these following video sharing sites:

YouTube
Vimeo (above)
Revver
Blip.tv

Note: If you put it on another video sharing site, let me know so I can include it in the list.

Also, the video is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA license meaning that you are free to copy and share the video as well as create derivative works so long as the new work is licensed under the same terms.

If you wish to express your displeasure to Photobucket about this matter, you can reach them via their contact form. Also, please consider contacting their partner in this process, Qoop, to let them know you disapprove of Photobucket’s policies. You can do so via their contact form and selecting “Photobucket” as the partner involved (You first have to solve the CAPTCHA to go to the form).

On that note, if you wish to upload the video to your account, edit it or otherwise have a copy of it, you can download the original .mov file by visiting drop.io here (click the “save” link above the video):

Drop.io Download

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to let me know.

I look forward to your feedback on this video.

The screencast is nothing short of brilliant and, in just under 20 minutes, manages to express what I have been trying to say in several articles on this site.

Perhaps the greatest indication of how effective the screencast is that Robert Scoble, formerly one of the staunchest supporters of RSS republishing, has said via FriendFeed that the video convinced him that he was wrong.

Also, Plagiarism Today does make an appearance in the screencast, at about the 12 minute mark, with reference to the Why RSS Scraping is Not OK column.

The video is embedded below so please enjoy. My thanks goes to Duncan for the effort he put into the video. I can imagine many bloggers will use this video as a tool to convince spam bloggers and other services that, perhaps, they don’t have the legal right to republish whatever they find in an RSS feed.

Most of the readers of this site may think that this talk is a little bit on the basic side. It was definitely an introductory discussion that may be a little bit below some of the long-term readers of this site. However, as I found out compiling my notes, a refresher course never hurts either.

I want to give a special thanks to John P. for arranging the video and getting it online as well as the wonderful people working for the city of Frisco, TX for both allowing us to host the event in their town hall and for doing the video editing and making me look almost good.

The video is below followed by links to other session videos as well as some of my personal WordCamp memories.

Other Sessions

Here are the other sessions that are currently available:

• Matt Mullenweg: WordPress 2.5 and Beyond
• John Pozadzides: 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog
• Cali Lewis & Neal Campbell: Just Start
• Liz Strauss: C’mon, Let’s Talk!
• Lorelle VanFossen: WordPress Power Tips
• Charles Stricklin & Company: WordPress Podcast Live (also includes me)
• Aaron Brazell: WordPress FAQs

There are other sessions slated to go up later this week or early next so pay attention to John P’s blog and see if any of the new sessions posted are of interest!

Personal Memories

WordCamp Dallas was a lifetime of memories in a few short days. I can not even begin to thank all of the people I met for making it special but I do want to thank Charles Stricklin, the nice people at the city of Frisco and everyone that contributed to the event. It was a great time.

With that in mind, here are, in no particular order, five of the strongest memories I’ve carried away from the event.

1. The unveiling of Woopra.
2. Matt Mullenweg announcing the release of WordPress 2.5 and 100s of laptops start firing up.
3. Lorelle ordering a large vegetable plate at a steakhouse and making all of the meat eaters, myself included, jealous.
4. Matt Mullenweg “hijacking” my laptop during the WordPress Podcast and using my beat up computer (his fingerprints are worth way more than the laptop).
5. Seeing Lorelle, Liz, Charles and everyone else for the first time in person and realizing that they are just as wonderful face to face as they are over the Web.

All in all, the experience was great and I can not wait until next year!

At the forty minute mark in the presentation, Cutts said something that was interesting to those of us who deal with spam blogs but has been largely overlooked. When discussing Google’s Webmaster Center, he mentioned that you can report spam through their Webmaster Tools feature and that they “give more weight” to those reports than the ones made through their public form.

In short, if you have access to Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is free and easy to register for, you can use the form in there to file a more meaningful spam report. Best of all, the form is identical to the public one and and should not seem foreign to anyone used to filing spam reports.

This is assumedly because the spam form in the Webmaster Tools is not anonymous, unlike the public one. Google, understandably, gives more significance to reports where they know the party providing the information.

To file the report, simply log into the Webmaster tools dashboard and click the “Report spam in our index” link on the right hand side. You report paid links.

This may resolve many of the claims that Google does not respond (see comments) to spam reports.

All in all, while this is a very simple trick, it might help with the reporting of spam in cases where a DMCA notice is simply not practical.

Note: In a strange coincidence, I found the video on John Pozadzides blog, who will be speaking directly before me at WordCamp Dallas.